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The articles that were removed two years ago from this site have been returned. When transscribe.wordpress.com ceased to be a paid for WordPress.com site the terms and conditions required that the site contained only unique content. As the site had moved to a non WordPress.com version of transwrites.com (an address first used for this site)…

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance which is held each year on 20th November to remember those who have been murdered in the past year with their trans status suspected as a motivation in their murder. I had the interesting experience of being at a Transgender Day of Remembrance event in Seattle last year that…

I have previously responded to negative reaction to Sarah Ditum’s call for trans people to stop campaigning for a no-platforming of the feminist journalist Julie Bindel, who is currently the Journalist in Residence at Brunel University. My response focused on the below the line commentator NatachaNatacha, who either is the London University academic Natacha Kennedy…

The no-platforming of journalist Julie Bindel has been raised in a New Statesman article by Sarah Ditum. The below the line comments to the article quickly filled with trans activists wanting to denounce Bindel (and Ditum for supporting her). One of the commenters, NatachaNatacha, comes to the defence of an anti-Bindel trans activist, Roz Kaveney,…

In the last couple of days media and social media has been full of the story of Avery Edison, a London-based stand-up comic who was refused entry to Canada and was sent to a men’s prison and later moved to a women’s prison. With scant regard for any journalistic research, the commentariat launched quickly into…

There are few quicker ways to lose an argument than to treat the people whom you are trying to persuade with disdain and hypocrisy. Yet that is precisely what Jennifer Finney Boylan has done in her Huffington Post article The ‘T’ Word. She shares the unfortunate inability of so many trans activists to realise the…

On Friday 5th December 2008 I was upset to be going home early from my Manchester University lecture, not upset that I was getting an early weekend, but upset because I had declined to attend a public lecture because I had to be in a course lecture. The public lecture that I missed was a…

The war of words between (some) trans activists and (some) feminists follows a general pattern for seemingly intractable debates. That pattern is that protagonists present arguments that will go down well with their side, rather than constructively engaging with the other side. Of course, there are those few who do seek constructive engagement, as otherwise…

Michael Singleton, the coroner who presided over the inquest into the death of Lucy Meadows has been informally advised of his failings by the Office For Judicial Complaints. This informal advice has been notified to a journalist, Gavin Drake, who complained about his closing comments to the press gallery, “Shame on you all.” The…

This article was originally inspired by Delilah Campbell’s “Who Owns Gender” and its wonderful wordplay on TERF and turf wars over gender. TERF is a recent trans activist acronym for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist and at first sight it appears to be an improvement on the previous tendency to attack all radical feminists, or sometimes…

There are few things more likely to lose a political argument than blatant hypocrisy, and that is a trap into which the trans community has fallen. A community that is so keen to define what others are allowed to call its members should not hypocritically impose a name on others. As I sit down to…

Jargon evolves quickly in the trans community, or should that be the transgender, gender variant, gender non-conforming, or gender minority, community. What it certainly should not be is the trans* community. Trans* is a term that has been gaining traction within (but not outside) the trans community. It is a well-meaning attempt to bring to…

On 16th July 2013, the House of Commons voted the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill across its final hurdle and it gained royal assent the following day. This should be a cause of great rejoicing in LGBT circles, but it has been decried because of what many trans activists and their allies have termed the…

On 28th May the inquest verdict was returned on Lucy Meadows, a trans woman whose death had sparked a wave of media speculation, a protest outside the offices of the Daily Mail, and two online petitions calling for the sacking of a Daily Mail columnist. This was Richard Littlejohn, who three months before her death…

In my previous article, Justine Judgement, I wrote a hasty response to Zoe O’Connell’s erroneous assertion that the Court of Appeal had ruled that stealth trans people had been criminalised. On subsequent reflection I would change nothing in that hasty response, as it is quite clear what the judgement says, and in particular clear that…